Did you know that our clients help drive our feature roadmap? It’s because of them that we’ve been able to develop new features that solve complex problems for enterprise SEOs.
Since we’re approaching the end of 2021 — we can't believe it either — we want to stop and say thank you, and highlight some of the top product innovations that are live in the seoClarity platform.
Our development team operates on two-week sprints, so there's always something new coming to the seoClarity platform. In fact, over the past year there have been hundreds of innovations added to the platform.
Here are some of our favorites. Let's jump in!
What’s New in seoClarity?
Everything in our platform solves a real industry problem. From content creation to task management, there are quite a few new platform features that you can now leverage to make your day-to-day work more efficient.
#1. Automated SEO Content Briefs
Here’s an all-too-familiar scenario: You assign a writing assignment to your content writer with certain expectations in mind (i.e. target audience, content length, topics to include, etc.).
What you get back, however, is far from what you envisioned.
You (potentially) just wasted your investment, and the writer wasted their time. This could be the end of a what-could-have-been great working relationship.
What’s there to do?
Establish the writing criteria for the project upfront so you and your content writer are on the same page (pun intended).
The best way to do this is with a systemized approach, which is why we introduced SEO content briefs into the seoClarity platform.
You can scale your content research and assignment process by creating a content brief in a matter of seconds. All of the key insights from our AI-driven content optimizer, Content Fusion, are compiled into a digestible brief that can be shared with your content writer.
#2. Page Change Monitoring
With so many teams making edits and additions on your site, critical site elements can be changed without you ever knowing. That is, until it’s too late and rankings plummet.
This is a far-too-common issue we’ve seen with enterprise SEOs. After all, most teams don’t know that their own actions impact SEO.
This is always why we created Content Guard — your 24/7 site-change watchdog. It can monitor any page (that’s your own, or your competitors’) for any imaginable change.
In fact, it automatically detects changes to more than 100 page elements, and sends out customizable alerts based on change type and severity.
#3. Expanded Keyword Research Data Set
Having access to a fresh keyword research data set is crucial for producing relevant content.
Clients have long used seoClarity to locate key terms and topics to target in their content, and things just got even better: an expanded dataset surfaces even more terms to focus on.
The keyword research data set has grown significantly — it now includes 28+ billion keywords across 170+ countries.
This makes it the largest keyword research data base available. Anywhere.
This freshness of keyword data and search volume is significantly faster than Google Keyword Planner, which only reports on new or updates to keywords about two months after the fact.
#4. Intent-Driven Topic Research
Keyword research is a large undertaking in SEO. You need to determine which keywords (and more importantly, topics) are most viable.
Plus, with so much data to dig through, the research process is a tedious and time-consuming process. Human limitation also restricts your understanding of a subject area, which leaves many unidentified gaps uncovered. That means millions of dollars worth of opportunities are left untapped!
To help you better understand the search landscape and speak the language of your target audience, we introduced Intelligent Match and Intent Similarity to Topic Explorer.
Intelligent Match automatically uncovers the hidden relationship between keywords used by your audience and reveals all the related topics.
If you’re writing content to target “survival kit” perhaps your limitation on the subject keeps you from knowing that people also search for “go bag” and “bug out bag”.
In just the first hour, I identified eight new high-value keywords to target, a key phrase to advertise against and several existing pages to improve …”
— Chris Giovagnoni, Digital Marketing Manager
Intelligent Match fills the gaps in your own knowledge so you can understand a subject completely. Then, use our Intent Similarity metric to discover the overlap in intent for each key topic as it relates to your seed keyword.
This clues you in on what topics can be covered with one content asset, and which need to be targeted on their own page.
Recommended Reading: Build Content that Drives Authority with Topic Explorer, Our Topic Cluster Tool
#5. Specialized Rank Tracking
The SERP is crowded with more than standard organic listings. Now, it’s important to monitor your rankings in Google entities like images and shopping results, too (if those insights are business critical, of course).
Google itself is now the competition.
We introduced specialized rank tracking so you can do just that. Use it to glean insights into your performance in the following areas to see how you can further improve:
- Google Images
- Google Shopping
- Free Product Listing
#6. Trended Search Volume
We’ve always shown search volume for keywords, but it's challenging to understand changes in demand over time — especially when understanding the overall impact of the pandemic on last year’s search volume.
For a quick, bird’s eye view analysis of demand change over time, Topic Explorer now offers 24-months worth of search volume.
This will help you surmise what the “natural” or common search demand was before the irregularities of 2020, and should help you plan ahead as well.
Search volume for “flights” over a two-year period:
#7. More Ways to Segment and Analyze Data
Search engine volatility makes it harder to report performance to stakeholders and to analyze longer-term trends.
With weekly and monthly ranking trends in the seoClarity platform, you can now quickly report on where your rankings ended up each week or month and present a clearer picture of your long-term performance — free from daily volatility.
To help you narrow in on specific data points, we’ve also added the option to select multiple page tags.
Plus, custom keyword and page groupings allow you to tell the right story out of your SEO data.
Use pre-built SEO segments, create custom categorization, or leverage sitewide categorization to find the digital needle in a haystack.
With dynamic SEO segmentation abilities like sorting your pages by a site hierarchy using breadcrumbs, for example, you can organize your data in a site-specific way.
More SEO segmentation capabilities let you continue to slice, dice, and analyze your data in the best way possible.
#8. Trended CTR Data Over Time
seoClarity users have always been able to see their click-through rate by the rounded average ranking position. Now, you can trend that CTR out over time to see the CTR for the top 10 rank positions.
This is especially useful to calculate the impact of Google title rewrites or tests to title tags and meta descriptions. Schema and seasonality both come into play here, too.
If listings at the bottom of page one have a better CTR than those at the top of the page, but those bottom listings have schema implemented, that shows the schema is working to drive clicks!
When it comes to seasonality, it's important to remember that Google can flip the switch on keyword intent at different times of the year. Terms that may have been informational in intent become transactional for holiday season, for example.
The CTR trend line is an interesting way to view seasonality and correlate ranking and impression changes with updates in Google for intent.
Psst! Have you seen our CTR research study? It's the largest of its kind ever conducted. Check it out!
#9. Track Performance in Google's Product Carousel
If you list products through Google's Merchant Center, this feature is for you!
Google's Product carousel shows up prominently in the top results for product related searches and can drive significant visibility.
Now you can track your performance in this increasingly important SERP feature right from Rank Intelligence in the seoClarity platform.
Enter the brand of your choice, and the report shows how many occurrences of the brand were found. Similar to other features, you can type in any brand — your own and your competitors'!
(Rank Intelligence in the seoClarity platform.)
Other Updates in seoClarity
Since we operate in two-week development releases, there have been plenty of other product innovations over the course of the year. Here are a few more of our favorites.
#10. Content Score
If you’ve spent hours of time crafting the perfect piece of content — or have received work from a content writer — but are hesitant to hit “publish”, you’re not alone.
Content is a key element for SEO, but it’s challenging to confirm content’s relevance before it goes live.
Most keyword recommendation systems only provide a list of general recommendations. You’re left wondering: Is the content really optimized? and Is there room for improvement?
Answering these questions manually is a time consuming, cumbersome, and subjective process.
Now with Content Score, you don’t have to worry about confirming copy’s relevance — let the technology do the work for you.
(Use the content score to confirm your content's relevancy.)
If you do use a content writer, the score helps to ensure that the writer fulfilled their expectations and leveraged all applicable data and insights in their work.
You’re also able to view the content structure (i.e. title, meta description, headlines) of top-ranking content to inform your own approach.
#11. Two-Way Task Management with JIRA
Managing tasks between the development team, content marketing team, and of course you as the SEO is often a nightmare. Everyone has their own priorities, after all, and each team tends to have a different system they work in.
While you tend to live inside the platform, your devs monitor task management systems like JIRA. Your content writers may not feel the need to work inside the platform, so silos start to go up.
With a real-time, two-way sync between the seoClarity platform and JIRA, you’re able to assign tasks, share relevant details, and follow up on status directly from the platform UI.
Those tasks and updates are then directly synced to JIRA, so developers can stay updated while staying in their own environment. You can also use the sync to send Content Fusion analyses and content briefs to your writers — all without having to leave seoClarity.
#12. Page Comparison
While it is possible to manually pick up on changes in content from two different environments (e.g. mobile vs. desktop, or live vs. dev, for example) it’s a tedious process.
The human eye will miss critical differences between the pages.
Now, with Page Comparison, you don’t have to rely on your eye sight: The technology analyzes the pages side-by-side and points out differences across 140 different on-page SEO factors.
(Comparing two category pages in the seoClarity platform.)
#13. Bulk Keyword Research
Now you can paste in a list of up to 100 keywords and get the top 1,000 matches from Topic Explorer exported and emailed to you!
This is bulk keyword research made simple.
Use this to get search volume for a list of keywords quickly, or to conduct in-depth keyword research on a new client, product, or project based on a seed list of keywords.
It's just another way we are working to help scale previously tedious SEO tasks.
#14. People Also Ask Ad-Hoc Export
Whether it's for a data science project or to research a specific area more in-depth, People Also Ask is a valuable source of insights into questions asked by your target audience.
Now it's easy to upload a list of keywords and get all the People Also Ask questions shown in the search results.
Simply use the existing ad hoc ranking feature to start a ranking project as you normally would, and the PAA extract is automatically generated and uploaded to your seoClarity SFTP location with the raw ranking data.
Want even more data?
The existing Content Ideas feature provides you access to the world's largest data set of People Also Ask questions — over 2 billion questions collected!
#15. Confirm That a Page Addresses the Right Intent
Many SEOs often have the same question when they discover new keywords in their research: Where does my domain rank for these? or Where does my competitor’s domain rank for these?
Topic Explorer now gives you the option to input your domain or any competitors' to see rank positions side-by-side with the keywords revealed in Topic Explorer. It even shows you which specific page ranks for that keyword.
This new feature closes the loop between keyword research and existing content, and allows you to match the performance of a page with the intent of a keyword to see how well they are aligned.
(Match topic ideas to any domains' current rank.)
#16. Filter by SERP Features in Your Topic Research
The results pages are crowded and ever-changing.
With search features, you may want to optimize your content to land in a certain feature like the featured snippet, for example.
Conversely, if a SERP is heavily crowded you may want to avoid that keyword/page since your content will be many folds down if it ranks.
To give you an indication of what SERP features appear for a particular query, we’ve added the ability to filter by SERP feature in Topic Explorer.
(Filter your topic research by search features.)
You can even filter by “No Great Matches” (a notice that Google shares when it can’t find any relevant listing to present) and “Social in KG” (which signals that a social media icon appears in the knowledge graph.
#17. Even More Content Ideas
User behavior is constantly changing. So much so that it’s hard to get a grasp on what real users are looking for when they search.
To gather content ideas based on real searchers, you can manually check the SERP for People Also Ask box, but like I said, search behavior never stays the same.
If you take the manual approach here, you’ll never get ahead.
We upgraded Content Ideas so it now supports 90+ markets. It’s the world’s largest People Also Ask data set!
The new algorithms reveal consistently high-quality questions so can answer questions that you know people have.
The new Content Ideas delivers 10x speed improvements; it searches through tens of billions of records to surface top questions in milliseconds.
(Content Ideas for the query “jeans”.)
#18. Site Health Score
Usability is a key component of SEO. Actually, if your site doesn’t have a strong technical foundation, even the best content won’t perform.
For something so important, it’s difficult to determine an overall quality of life for your site based on the findings of a crawl.
Now there’s an easy-to-understand metric of your site’s technical aptitude: Site health score.
(Site Health score in the seoClarity platform.)
The score is based on a weighting of all the issues found in the site audit and provides an easy to understand metric for overall site health.
Plus, the new UI presents details in a much easier to consume format. It also brings the focus on the most important details.
#19. Google Trends Topics
We brought Google Trends into the platform last year to help clients address changes in user demand as a result of the pandemic.
Because of the response, we’ve kept it around … and even gave it an upgrade.
Even with the Google Trends UI, it’s hard to compare the interest level in a topic over a period of time.
Now with the ability to pull in entire topics from Google Trends into the seoClarity platform, you can check topic-wide demand with three years of YoY analysis.
(Compare the current year’s trend to that of the past two years.)
#20. More Frequent Page Speed Retrieval
Page speed continues to be an important factor for providing a positive user experience. But as your site changes, so can page speed.
It’s challenging to monitor these changes over time, but you can’t ignore it! Not to mention page speed’s role with Core Web Vitals update coming in summer 2021.
We now offer weekly page speed updates so you can continue to monitor at scale, now at a greater frequency.
#21. Compare SERP Previews
Clients have always been able to access a cached version of the SERPs to confirm their rank position. Now, the SERP preview feature supports date comparison.
Use this to load and compare the actual search result pages side by side, for any two dates.
Synchronized scrolling makes it easy to review the SERP and identify:
- Layout changes
- New features added/removed
- Title or meta changes
- And more!
#22. Export Ad Hoc Projects to Amazon S3
Get your ad hoc project data into the hands of your data science teams as quickly as possible.
With this update, you can configure an Amazon S3 bucket to export your ad hoc ranking or search volume project data as soon as it is available.
Conclusion
We welcome the above features into the seoClarity family! We hope you can find value in using them. As always, reach out to your Client Success Manager if you have any questions about a feature functionality.
If you're a current client, don't forget to add your feature requests directly in the platform.
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